EdReform 10.0
A collective commitment and agenda for the next decade to ensure freedom, flexibility, and innovation in U.S. schools

Introduction

In his dramatic biography No Struggle, No Progress, self-described black power advocate Howard Fuller wrote of Frederick Douglass’ famous admonition that, “Power concedes nothing without a demand”. Fuller says it was the relationship between struggle and progress that propelled him down dark alleys and dirt roads in the 1960’s to defend the civil liberties of his community, and what drives him to continue to fight for educational equality and parental choice.

“Education reform is one of the most crucial social justice issues of our time,” writes Fuller, “and I will spend the rest of my days fighting for my people, most especially those without the power or the resources to fight for themselves.”

Dedicated commitment from education reform activists such as Howard Fuller is the reason why laws have been enacted to provide educational opportunities across school districts nationwide from the low-income areas in Milwaukee, marginalized communities of Washington, D.C., as well as provide statewide school choice options in Florida, Minnesota and Nevada.

In 1980, when Ted Kolderie first wrote about the critical nature of breaking the exclusive franchise of the traditional school district which held parents captive based on zoned attendance, few imagined his dual track prescription for creating new, responsive schools in the spirit of choice and diversity would evolve into to a charter school movement that has enabled charter school laws to be enacted in 90 percent of our nation’s states.

The promise of laws that empowered educators and parents to create new neighborhood schools was too big and too bold to be stopped.

Despite the promising strides made over the breadth of 25 years of charter education, the inadequacy of charter laws in many states leaves most students and families without sufficient educational options. State imposed caps, underfunded charters, and a culture of political expediency by advocates has resulted in lost opportunities, and apathy by new legislators who are content to give reformers only what is requested.

The old school argument that America should “just fix the system” rather than create new opportunities for students have resurfaced, and have many people believing that the idea of improving traditional schools is new. In reality, decades of unsuccessful efforts to “fix the system” motivated the founders of today’s reforms, people like Howard Fuller. Ted Kolderie, the visionary, argued we must divest the “exclusive franchise” held by districts and ensure that both diversity of learning opportunities and participants and choice by parents were the critical elements for widespread educational improvements to occur. Yet today, the significant work of these education reformers often seems like a distant memory as Governors, lawmakers, and philanthropists create “new” systems to take over the old; systems distinguished only by different actors, not fundamentally different power structures.

In his newest book The Split Screen Strategy: Improvement + Innovation, Kolderie argues “Successful systems combine ‘improvement’ and ‘innovation’, working to make the existing model better while opening to the introduction of new and different models”. The chartered sector is essential for the improvement of public education, functioning as the seedbed for new models of school, and new approaches to teaching and learning, that will gradually migrate over to the district sector. This combination of ‘improving-the-existing’ and ‘opening-to-innovation’ is the “split screen” approach, easing the transition in the system and not allowing politics to dictate a ‘one best way’ for learning.

In the most influential book on school choice of all time, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools, the late John Chubb and Terry Moe argued that, “Choice is a self-contained reform with its own rationale and justification. It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in a myriad of other ways.”

The most successful reformers, those who turned principle into practice over the past two and half decades, agree, and must unite to see it happen. Again.